- Awesome Music: Yes, indeed!
- Demonic Spiders: In Stage 4 of RayStorm, there are battleships that fire a battery of lasers that meet your plane of movement and then fire down the screen, with almost no time to position yourself correctly to avoid them. If you haven't memorized where the lasers will travel, expect to burn several continues in this stage as a result. The boss of the stage has these lasers too.
- Difficulty Spike: The last 1/3 of RayStorm Stage 5 is generally agreed to be the point where the game's difficulty curve turns into a cliff. Enemies from here on out are much more vicious with more widely-covering attacks, often having semi-randomized patterns that render memorization-based practice useless, and the Stage 6 boss in particular is regarded as the hardest one in the entire game.
- Fan Nickname:
- While RayCrisis is the only game in the series that wasn't officially named "Layer Section" in Japan, fans sometimes refer it as Layer Section III.
- R-GEAR has been dubbed by fans as "RayForce 1.5" as the only trailer for the game showcased some of the ideas that could have been implemented into this game was later used for RayStorm instead, while having the same 2D visuals of RayForce.
- First Installment Wins: RayForce is generally regarded as the best game in the series due to its impressive use of scaling and rotating sprites, making it one of the most 3D-looking sprite-based games in existence. RayStorm and RayCrisis are not as highly-regarded due to 3D graphics that haven't aged well, the isometric perspective creating problems with dodging enemy fire, and same-altitude lock-on and the bonus-point opportunities that go with it discouraging players from using their main shot.
- Genius Bonus: If you're good at history of the Roman Empire, you'll understand a lot more about RayStorm, including the bosses and the storyline.
- Goddamned Bats: In Stage 4 of RayStorm, there are battleships way in the background that your ship can lock onto. This causes problems for R-Gray 2 in particular; its lock-on attack is a single bolt of thunder that has to sequentially tag its targets, so getting a lock-on onto one of those background ships forces the bolt to take its time flying into the background, delaying your attack on enemies closer to the foreground but not on your plane of movement.
- Memetic Psychopath: The protagonists of RayStorm are featureless pilots with no personality to speak of, and presumably are Just Following Orders to crush the Secilian rebellion by destroying the Juda Central System, with the consequences elabored upon in the Extra Mode ending where their actions destroy the entire colony and all 7 billion people on it. Lore-minded fans like to joke that these Earth soldiers carried out their orders not to protect Earth but to commit intentional mass murder.
- Narm: The Japanese version of RayCrisis has one of the bosses named "Sem-Slut," renamed to "Sem-Strut" in the English localization. This wasn't the case with the European PC port.
- Narm Charm: This voiced line at the start of RayForce: "This is the control tower. Make a left turn, over." It doesn't seem like it fits in with the game at all (your ship's auto-coursing doesn't turn left in any point of the stage), and seems like it was meant for a flight simulation game (such as the Landing Series, also by Taito). Nonetheless it's regarded as a key part of the game experience.
- Nintendo Hard: It's an arcade Shoot 'Em Up series, after all. The first game doesn't even grant you a Smart Bomb to defend yourself with. In addition, many enemies have quick laser attacks and homing laser attacks that are very difficult to outsmart.
- Player Punch: The ending of the original arcade version of RayStorm seems like an unambiguously good ending: The Juda Central System has been destroyed, and so has the Secilian fleet, and Earth has been saved. But completing Extra Mode in RayStorm has more dire results: You're also shown the charred wreck of Secilia you just flew out of, and you also get a text crawl explaining that thanks to your actions, 70% of its 7 billion inhabitants have died, and the rest are going to go too as the moon is drawn into the gravity well of the nearby gas giant Seraphim. All while the text crawl declares "Mission Accomplished". Congrats on committing genocide in the name of Earth! As if doesn't enough, the Extra Mode ending has the R-GRAY heavily damaged, moving into parts unknown with no Earth in sight... The 13 Ship Mode ending is even worse: Earth is also destroyed, meaning that at best, the player achieved a Mutual Kill.
- Pop Culture Holiday: August 4, the day that Operation RayStorm was launched, often leads to social media celebrations and fanart by series fans.
- Porting Disaster:
- RayForce's (a.k.a. Layer Section) original PC port has some glaring problems. One of them being the game screen itself, which has been screen crunched to fit in a 4:3 aspect-ratio that was never intended for the game originally designed with a vertical display, making the game harder than it should since you can't anticipate oncoming enemies or lock-on to them as efficiently as you could in the arcade, console, and mobile versions. Unlike the PC ports of its sequels, the fullscreen scaling does not work properly on newer Windows operating systems and 16:9 monitors, which often results a smaller screen size with color distortion despite being running in 640×480 that many modern displays still support. Another game-breaking issue is the game's speed, where it plays ridiculously fast on faster computers to the point of it being unplayable. While the latter can be addressed with a simple .dll fix if you have the game disc, but the fullscreen issue can only fixed by a third-party program DirectX wrapper such as dgVoodoo 2 to play the game with proper scaling. Other problems includes missing effects and backgrounds, some of the music tracks don't play at all (such as the Game Over music), and you don't have the disc into your CD drive, then enjoy playing the game with no music at all.
- The Sega Saturn port of RayStorm (Layer Section II) introduces some novelties it has over the PlayStation and PC versions, such as new CGI cinematics in between stages and a playable R-GRAY 0 outside of 13-Plane Mode, but due to the Saturn's notorious 3D handicap, the graphics were understandably downgraded but its biggest problem was its frame-rate, which bogs down substantially when the action intensifies and can cause input lag despite the cutbacks on the game's visuals.
- The PC (via Steam) version of Layer Section & Galactic Attack S-Tribute by City Connection instantly falls under this just for mandating a game controller and supposedly not having keyboard support, which is absolutely inexcusable for a shoot 'em up that merely has 8-way digital controls and two gameplay buttons. We say supposedly here because, as it turns out, the devs did in fact have functional keyboard controls in this port, and even shows what they are in the in-game default controls reference. You just can't remap those controls to something that makes actual sense.
- Polished Port:
- The PS1 version of RayCrisis had to make a few sacrifices in the presentation department (between-level transitions are now black-background loading screens with the music stopped in the meanwhile, and even this still manages to be worked into the game's atmosphere by explaining it as, paraphrasing, "loading the next part of Con-Human"), changed the True Final Boss requirements, and removed the co-op feature, but it allows players to freely choose whatever levels they want for the middle three from the onset instead of having to input a cheat code or play all through possible permutations to unlock the feature. It also unlocks WR-03 by default rather than requiring the player to unlock it on their account over time or use a cheat code, unlockable R-GRAY ships from RayStorm, and features a new Arrange Mode.
- The PC ports of RayStorm and RayCrisis runs at a higher resolution than their PlayStation counterparts (at 640×480) with improved and more audible sound effects (e.g. you can hear sound of R-GRAY 2's laser beams and the ambient machine noise of Yggdrasil). Despite being released for Windows 95/98, both games runs quite well on modern systems (unless you're on Windows 8 or 8.1 where older DirectX support is botched, resulting in lower frame-rates with these games) and those with higher-end machines can enjoy the almost non-existent loading times. The only downside of the PC version of RayStorm that it lacks the optional TANZ soundtrack of the Extra Mode the console versions have and requires the disc to run the game, and RayCrisis' port is based on the PlayStation version which lacks co-op multiplayer and the continuous soundtrack.
- RayStorm HD for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 overhauls the game's visuals to HD standards (albeit stretched from 4:3 to 16:9 to fake widescreen presentation) with the addition of an unlockable R-GRAY 0 that plays like the RVA-818-X-LAY fighter from RayForce instead of an inferior R-GRAY 1 and the Difficult, but Awesome R-GEAR that offer their own playstyles. It also features online leaderboards with sharable replays. Also, for those who live in North America and had to deal with Working Designs' Japanese-default-difficulty mockery, this port lets you complete the game on any difficulty you want, though at the expense of individual difficulty sliders for each stage.
- The mobile ports of these games featured higher resolution visuals and UI, a new but optional remixed track for their first stage (while the Amazon versions of RayForce and RayStorm gets an exclusive remix for the second stage), touch controls that are very welcoming to newcomers to shoot 'em ups along with controller support (after updates were released) for those that want to play these games with traditional controls instead, and in the case of RayCrisis, while retaining the seamless stage connections and most of the features from the original arcade version with the Special Mode from the home versions. A few small caveats with these ports however are RayStorm's inability to chose between soundtracks for its Remix Mode (a.k.a. Extra Mode) and difficulty sliders of individual stages similarly to the HD remastered version, and their lack the various unlockables that their home conversions had (e.g. 13-Plane Mode in RayStorm plus the new ships from HD, the unlockable R-GRAY ships and Gallery in RayCrisis) due to being primarily based off their arcade versions as well as the lack of co-op support.
- Ray'z Arcade Chronology for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and PC once again has M2 hitting it out of the park with their masterful ports. The arcade versions of all three games are included in the package, with RayStorm in particular getting a new HD version with the correct aspect-ratio and all the features of the arcade original (such as adjustable per-stage difficulty, but without the infamous "Training Mode" mechanic from the Working Designs version) and RayCrisis finally seeing an Arcade-Perfect Port for the first time.note All three games have optional gadgets that show real-time gameplay data, multiple rapid-fire options, manual and automatic save states, and the two 3D games having an option to disable firing a Special Attack with simultaneous press of the shot and laser buttons to instead use a separate button for that purpose. It also features the ability to play these games with the original arcade soundtrack or the arranged soundtracks from their home ports as well, allowing players to enjoy these games with their favorite soundtrack. The collection also features online leaderboards for all three games with shareable replays similarly to RayStorm HD.
- Scrappy Mechanic:
- Only one word for RayCrisis — "Encroachment". Explanation
- Working Designs did a bit of Easy-Mode Mockery and Difficulty by Region for RayStorm's PS1 port. First, the default difficulty has been bumped from 2 in the Japanese version to 4. Second, if you set any stage's difficulty below 4 or change your live count above the default of 3, the game puts you in "Training Mode", which ends the game after Stage 4. The game lets you set Stages 5-8 to below level 4 difficulty, but in a display of oversight on Working Design's part, you will still be denied entry to those stages. In other words, it's Streets of Rage 3 all over again.
- RayStorm and RayCrisis have a Smart Bomb special attack that is fired by pressing the shot and laser buttons at the same time (or a dedicated button if playing the former in Auto mode). However, given that the average player will be frantically pushing both buttons, it's all too easy to accidentally fire the bomb, bomb energy takes a while to recharge, and you can only have one bomb at a time. The Ray'z Arcade Chronology version thankfully has a toggle to disable this behavior and instead use a separate button for the special attack.
- The unlock requirements for the True Final Boss, Infinity, are a little too lenient:
- In the arcade version, once you have cleared five different maps on the same account, from then on reaching Dis-Human with less than 25% Encroachment forces the player to fight Infinity after Dis-Human. A decent player can meet that requirement even without trying too hard, since if they are between 25-45% Encroachment going into the last boss before Dis-Human, they can potentially kill the boss fast enough to reduce the Encroachment below 25%. And if Infinity is encountered, but the player does not actually finish the fight (likely due to running out of coins, or just getting fed up with the fight), the map isn't considered completed, while defeating Dis-Human without triggering Infinity does. This means if the player is trying to complete maps to unlock the stage select feature, they're forced either to fight a new final boss that is quite likely out of their league and will have them feeding lots of extra money just to mark the map done, or to Do Well, But Not Perfect and intentionally let enemies live and prolong boss fights to keep Encroachment relatively high to avoid fighting that damned Bullet Hell egg.
- The PS1 port of RayCrisis loosens the requirement for the True Final Boss from "clear at least five different maps on your account, then defeat Dis-Human with less than 20% Encroachment" to "just clear any three maps of your choice, then reach and defeat Dis-Human with less than 5 continues". On one hand, this makes it easier to get the true ending. On the other hand, it forces 1-credit clear attempts to include said true final boss; there's no toggle to force the "normal" ending after Dis-Human. Some players will consider the run 1CC if they just reach Infinity for this reason.
- Originally, the Ray'z Arcade Chronology version of RayCrisis allows the player to switch to an alternate soundtrack that uses tracks from raycrisis rayons de l'Air arrange album, and uses ".BLUE - To Live Again on Earth -", the 24-minute piece used for the Special Mode of the PS1 port in an Arcade-Perfect Port of the game for the first time. Unfortunately, for some reason, there are separate player databases for the original soundtrack and the alternate soundtrack (implying that there are actually two separate builds of the game), meaning none of your data (local best scores, play counts, WR-03 unlock, etc.) carry over if you change soundtracks. This was later fixed with an update; now play data persists across soundtrack changes.
- Self-Imposed Challenge: The version of Dis-Human in RayCrisis that the player meets if they top out the Encroachment meter has maximum rank, making it much harder than a low- or even 0%-Encroachment Dis-Human. As such, some players intentionally trigger 100% Encroachment to try to beat this max-rank Dis-Human.
- Sequel Difficulty Drop: RayCrisis is easier than the previous two games for several reasons. First, the Hyper Attack has been buffed, dealing a lot more damage which makes it a great way to speed up boss fights. Second, enemies have been made more balanced, with fewer attacks that require extremely skilled maneuvers or involve jumpscare Trial-and-Error Gameplay. Finally, the game is shorter; whereas its predecessor RayStorm takes about 30 minutes to complete and has eight stages (seven full-body stages and one Boss-Only Level), RayCrisis only requires the player to complete five stages (one warm-up stage, three full-body stages, and the Final Boss), and takes about 15-20 minutes. The True Final Boss can throw a wrench in the player's attempts to clear the game, but in the arcade version, it can be avoided by entering the final stage with at least 20% Encroachment or starting a new file.note
- So Okay, It's Average: The overall consensus on Layer Section & Galactic Attack S-Tribute, a port of the Saturn version of RayForce for Switch, PS4, Xbox, and Windows PC. While it's far from a Porting Disaster, with somewhat reasonable input response by City Connection standards, and coming with some extras like save states and a stage practice mode, it doesn't do much to really justify its relatively high price tag or encourage people to choose this over emulating the arcade original or its Sega Saturn port. Not helping matters is that shortly after this was released, the Compilation Re-release Ray'z Arcade Chronology by M2 was announced, and M2 has a reputation of being a trusted brand amongst retro video game fans. Now that that compilation has been released, Layer Section & Galactic Attack S-Tribute is seen by series fans as obsolete, and is only worth getting if one only have an Xbox.
- Special Effects Failure: In RayStorm, Seraphim is supposed to be a gas giant in a star system different from the Solar System, but it's depicted in the Stage 5 background and loading screens of the console ports' Extra Mode as merely a green-tinted Jupiter, Great Red Spot and all.
- Tainted by the Preview:
- Layer Section & Galactic Attack S-Tribute wrong-footed much of the shoot 'em up community from the moment it was announced, due to the publisher being City Connection, a team infamous for Porting Disasters that slap on additional, non-negligible amounts of input lag. Beyond that, it's a port of the Sega Saturn port of RayForce, which isn't considered an awful port but doesn't have many extras compared to the arcade original, so many people scratched their heads as to why Taito would contract out ports of a port of an arcade game. The port was eventually released to lukewarm reception, not being seen as an outright Porting Disaster (unless you want to play the PC version with a keyboard) but still not being regarded as worth the price.
- While the inclusion of R-GEAR as part of the Ray'z Arcade Chronology caught some by surprise, the game being restricted as a limited pre-order item at Amazon Japan was met with criticism. Keep in mind, this isn't the first time Taito did something like this, as prior to the release of Darius Cozmic Collection in Japan, Sagaia GB (a port of the first Darius for the Game Boy) was also offered as a limited pre-order bonus at Amazon Japan and two years later at Strictly Limited Games as part of Darius Cozmic Revelation. But unlike Sagaia GB, R-GEAR is a one level only prototype of an unreleased game, something that soured opinions regarding the compilation because of its limited availability.
- As soon as it was announced that Strictly Limited Games and their sister company ININ would be handling the localization of Ray'z Arcade Chronology, many fans did a hard pass and chose to just import the Japanese version, as ININ has a reputation of delaying localized releases of Japanese games by months in order to ensure that the digital and physical versions ship out at the same time. The Japanese version features English as a language option anyway, and both platforms it's on are region-free, so English-speaking players found little reason to wait another three months for the Western release in June 2023, three months after the Japanese release of March 2023. ININ additionally announcing a separate release with just RayStorm and RayCrisis (excluding RayForce) further confused and generated distrust amongst fans. And that's for the digital versions. Those who ordered the physical edition have to wait until 2024 to receive their copies, which ends up affirming the concerns of those who are averse to Western physical edition releases.
- That One Attack:
- The tricky-to-dodge "Taito Homing Lasers", which have also appeared in the Darius series.
- In RayCrisis, if Pro-Tor, the boss of the Intelligence and Consideration Parts, is fought as the third or fourth stage boss, then once it appears to be destroyed, it will mount one final stand where it fires volleys of long pink lasers while harassing you with orange Homing Lasers at the same time, forcing you to follow the rhythms of two different attacks. It doesn't help that the explosion animations of the boss continue during this phase, making it harder to see the lasers.
- Dis-Human, the Final Boss of RayCrisis, has two distinct ones:
- In the intermission from its first form to second, it unleashes an orb that follows you, sucks you in slowly, is lethal if you touch its core and which absorbs your lock-on attacks, preventing you from damaging the boss. The boss also throws Taito's signature Homing Lasers during this time, which require considerable understanding of their curving patterns to avoid while being careful not to be pulled into the orb.
- In its second form proper, there's a part where it strafes from one side of the screen to the other, fires out tightly-packed needle lasers, and repeats this two more times, which is about as close to a proper Bullet Hell game as this game will get barring the True Final Boss itself. It's similar to one of Sem-Fray's (the boss of Emotion Part) phase two attacks, but considerably more dangerous and likely to prompt using continues.
- The True Final Boss of RayCrisis, Infinity, is already a ridiculous step up from Dis-Human, but has two notable attacks:
- If you fire your Round Divider, it counterattacks by firing a large aimed orb that is sure to kill you unless you're "turning" around Infinity fast enough.
- In its second phase has it generate turrets that fire continuous lasers while spinning around. There are several other objects that Infinity also throws on the field that can block those lasers, but they can be destroyed by accident. If this happens, and you don't have a Round Divider ready, you're hosed, and even if you do have one, you have to deal with the counterattack orb afterwards. One wonders if Ecliptic Meteor was inspired by this attack...
- That One Boss: Alaric, the Stage 6 boss of RayStorm. A huge transforming mecha that can turn into a fighter craft similar to yours, has two vicious drones that can snipe you with a laser beam and homing missiles while Alaric itself use a beam bazooka and machine gun in its mech form while its fighter form can rain down nasty arching lasers from the background that covers nearly the entire screen and a tricky-to-avoid spread shot in the foreground. If you think blowing up its bazooka would help (either shooting them directly or whittling Alaric's HP down), you'll be in for a rude warning when it starts using the shoulder-mounted laser cannons the can fire in a huge spread and covers more the screen with its machine gun.
- Tough Act to Follow: None of the sequels have replicated the same critical acclaim that RayForce did, due to substituting the fantastic 2D scaling and rotating effects for more generic polygons, an annoying Three-Quarters View, and implementing changes that throw the scoring meta out of balance.
- Visual Effects of Awesome: RayForce in particular is well-known for its intensive use of sprite scaling and rotating that could put the Super NES to shame. The fact that its sequels go full-3D, thus discarding the use of these effects, is part of what makes them so contentuous.
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